How are you?
Because if you don't write it down, you'll forget you lived it
My wife likes to tell about the time she tried something her grandmother prepared for her and did not like. “You have to learn to like things,” said her grandmother. I’ve heard this story for more than a decade now and think I only just recently started to understand it. You have to learn how to do things, even those things that seem like a matter of taste. I’ve been trying to learn to become more aware of my thoughts and emotions so I can be in charge of my own life. At its most basic, what I’m learning to do is to pay attention.
I can tell when I’m doing a lousy job at paying attention when someone asks me how I’m doing and nothing comes to mind. Either I recite previous answers by rote (“Kids are great, thanks!”) or I am stopped in my tracks. How am I doing? Shouldn’t I know this?
I am learning to pay attention. The phrase “pay attention” has been beguiling me lately. What is the cost of paying attention? Is it that you’re not giving your attention elsewhere? Does paying attention to one thing cost you the rest of the world?
I don’t know, but here’s what I’ve been paying attention to this week:
What I’ve been reading
I thought the two kinds of humor were funny and unfunny. Turns out there are three: Monro’s “Theories of Humor” and none of them are funny.
Also, here’s how humor works in your brain according to Harvard.
Not bad news: “Exercise officially makes you happier than money, according to Yale and Oxford research,” in Business Insider.
Maybe we’re not as polarized as we think, or at least as we Tweet. “The whisper room: Moderates on Twitter are losing their voice: MU researcher finds social media might be artificially exaggerating political polarization,” by Michael Kearney, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. And then again, maybe we are, according to Pew.
Pam Colloff’s latest on an old man in prison for a murder he didn’t commit: “Joe Bryan Denied Parole for the Seventh Time” in Pro Publica. Read it and tell me that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
And if that didn’t make you angry enough, here’s Keri Blankinger’s latest in the Houston Chronicle, “Inmate with wool allergy moves forward with suit over Texas prison's refusal to give cotton blanket.” By the way, you should listen to her new podcast.
Axios looked at data about millennials in the workplace. Good luck!
Trump hasn’t ruined political satire, but he is beyond satire.
The always-smart Paul Kane on Nancy Pelosi calling her shot.
This paragraph in Frank Bruni’s latest column:
I guarantee you that Buttigieg’s adherence to “a critical mass of gendered expectations” and failure to “activate” the homosexual-alert siren don’t mean that being gay has been incidental to his life and is incidental to his perspective. That he didn’t come out until he was 33 is all the proof you need that he wrestled privately with his sexual orientation and with fears about how the world would respond to it and to him.
Are you reading Monica Hesse in the Washington Post? She’s the thoughtful voice we need in the #MeToo era, and here’s her take on Uncle Joey B. There are too many great lines to quote, and all of them are interlocking in their subtle nuance. So, you know, read it.
Finally, Dan Zak is proof the God exists and she loves us. Maybe I am making too much of this, but his piece on Al Gore Jr. and climate change is nothing you fear it would be and everything you didn’t know it could be — just like everything else he writes.
Backstage at Ebenezer, Gore needed to rest his bum knees and study his remarks. He settled into a chair, his slacks revealing a worn pair of black cowboy boots, many soles faithfully departed. He had been going for 12 hours and still had three more to go. You’ve got to learn how to work, his father would tell him on the family farm in Tennessee, and Gore, approaching 71, was still learning.
What I’ve been writing
Brands using humor is hard, unless you’re this Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin. Are you as funny as this sign?
The future of newspapers is nothing like newspapers, and that doesn’t just mean electronic online versions of newspapers. As influencers replace editors, the core social mission of news is reasserting itself as news networks become social networks.
Also something I’m not ready to tell you about yet.
What I’ve been listening to
“Cuz I Love You” by Lizzo, “Ashamed” by Omar Apollo, “Being With You” by Smokey Robinson (because Slate’s “Hit Parade” podcast reminded me about it), and “I Want It That Way” not because Backstreet’s back but because of this scene in what is subversively the most woke, anti-toxic masculinity, sex-positive movie I’ve ever seen.
What I’ve been watching (also: I have a problem with you)
None of you told me to watch “Difficult People” on Hulu. I just don’t know what to think about you now. Come to find out some of you had been watching it and not telling me. I don’t know which of you is a greater danger to the good people of town: them’s that watch it and don’t tell, or those who never knew about it in the first place. God bless all of you, and hurry.
One photograph I took
